Scale and nature of child sexual abuse

To tackle child sexual abuse we must understand its causes, scope, scale and impact. There has been increasing awareness of child sexual abuse and its impact on victims and survivors in recent years. However, there are still many gaps in our knowledge and understanding which limit how effectively we are tackling the issue.

The CSA Centre has a long-term strand of work to improve understanding of the scale and nature of child sexual abuse. There has been increasing awareness of CSA and its impact on victims and survivors in recent years, but there is still too much that remains unknown about the sexual abuse of children and young people in England and Wales.

We are currently making decisions in a fog, using poor quality and old data. In order to make better decisions, target responses effectively and best protect children, we need better data about both the prevalence and contexts of CSA nationally and what agencies know about at a local level.

What do we currently know and not know?

The first steps in this strand of the CSA Centre's work have been an analysis of what we currently do and do not know from existing prevalence studies and data from statutory services, and an exploration of the different methodologies used in studies of child sexual abuse around the world.

Scoping report

Professor Liz Kelly and Kairika Karsna

This report has been produced in partnership with London Metropolitan University, and informed by two expert workshops. The report was first published in July 2017 and was revised in August 2018. It includes current best estimates of the prevalence of child sexual abuse (including exploitation) and sets out how we can improve the data and our understanding.

The CSA Centre data collection template

Despite many agencies working with children who have experienced sexual abuse and people who have committed CSA, the data that is readily available from these services is limited, uses variable definitions and is difficult to extract, analyse and compare.

Having previously highlighted the limitations of available data, the CSA Centre has worked with key stakeholders in statutory and voluntary services to develop a specification for core data fields to be collected by agencies delivering services in response to CSA. These core data fields are presented in our ‘data collection template’.

The CSA Centre and the participating stakeholders believe that the integration of the data collection template into existing data systems will improve our collective ability to extract and analyse service data and enable us to make comparisons over time, between localities and in response to interventions and policy changes. In order to test how these data fields can be populated, analysed and reported on we have applied them in a number of contexts:

application to data collected by the St Mary’s SARC;

piloting of application in four local areas.

Characteristics and experiences of children and young people attending Saint Mary’s Sexual Assault Referral Centre, Greater Manchester: A review of 986 case files

This report presents the findings and learning from extracting and analysing the narrative data collected in case files held by St Mary’s SARC using a set of core data fields developed by the CSA Centre. The study sought to explore the value and practicability for agencies to collect core data systematically about the nature of CSA, the people involved in and affected by it, and associated services.

This study shows that the introduction of consistent and comprehensive data collection would be unlikely to add additional burden to the existing data recording. Much of this data already exists in the narrative case files; collecting the information in a way that is extractable and easier to interpret and analyse will allow for better monitoring and comparison across services, localities and interventions.

The report tells us about the people who are accessing the SARC’s services, and just as importantly, the people who aren’t accessing them. For example, compared to the local population, minority ethnic groups were under-represented in the sample and boys were more likely than girls to attend the SARC after long periods of abuse. This information provides valuable insights which can be used to inform improvements in future practice and service reach, such as by testing interventions and outreach activity aimed at identifying boys earlier and being more accessible to BAME children and communities.

The findings from the piloting in five localities will be published alongside the data collection template this Summer.

What can we learn from the methods used in international surveys?

Professor Lorraine Radford

This rapid evidence assessment has been commissioned to inform work on improving the collection of data in England and Wales. It looks at the differences in victim and perpetrator self-report survey methodologies used internationally to measure the prevalence of CSA and CSE, in order to identify good practice that could be replicated here (and which might facilitate comparisons with studies in other countries).